Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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slightly more common in the past few years ( Dussere 2010, Hutchinson
2008), indicating potentially receptive grounds for reevaluating Vineland’s
status in the Pynchon canon.
In reevaluating the novel’s political and historical merit, I will suggest
that its initial critical reception was colored by the novel’s appearance
in the midst of a volatile time for historical scholarship of the sixties.
Much of this work was still produced by former participants in radical
movements, but the transition from the conflicted and cynical seventies
into the rise of Reagan’s populist conservatism pressed scholars to
shift from accounts of the New Left’s transformation or redirection
into explanations of the New Left’s near total collapse. In this milieu,
Vineland was often treated as an artifact of sixties counterculture and
represented as evidence in one account or another of the period, when,
in fact, this retrospective novel attempts a historiographic intervention
in our conversation about the period. That intervention has gone largely
unnoticed because its political position—anarchism—has been elided too
often by historical accounts of the sixties.These accounts, often polemical,
tend to polarize into two camps: first, postmodern defenses of the rise of
identity politics and radical subjectivitist philosophies as antidotes to the
crypto-chauvinisms of the New Left, and, second, more-or-less classically
Marxist contentions that the New Left collapsed because of its decentral-
ism and ideological heterogeneity, because, that is, it failed to remain
strictly Marxist or socialist. Literary assessments that stem from either
sort of account have thus looked past Vineland’s specifically anarchist
politics and the historical pressures to which the novel attributes those
politics, imputing to the book political vagary and a lack of historical
consciousness.
These oversights in both Marxist and postmodern readings are
particularly unfortunate because the novel’s anarchist intervention in
the historiography of sixties radicalism aims to encompass both readings
in a productive mutual tension. Anarchism is particularly useful for this
intervention because it is an attempt to enact a left-wing concept of social
justice through a dialectical mediation of individualist philosophy and
collectivist economics. Arising contemporaneously with Marxism in the
1840s, anarchist philosophers and organizations accept Marxian economic
critique, but they believe that the cohesion of a democratic society must
stress a universal and mutual respect for individual freedom. A complicated
mixture of cooperation and rivalry has thus existed between anarchists
and Marxists since the years of the First International (1864–1876), when
factions rallied behind the ideas of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and
Marx himself, clashing over whether or not a people’s revolution could
ever occur within the structure of a nation-state whose hierarchical
centralism anarchists find inherently coercive. The Bakunin-Marx split
has played itself out repeatedly. From the rivalry between the Industrial
Workers of the World ( IWW) and the Communist Party USA (CPUSA)
in the 1920s to that between Yippies and Leninist cadres of Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) in the sixties, virtually every major era of leftist
radicalism since then has been structured on a spectrum of Marxist and
anarchist impulses, caught between competing claims of centralized orga-
nizational discipline on one side and decentralist grassroots confederacy
on the other. Broadly speaking, the Old Left was a Marxist phenomenon,
and the New Left was, at first, a largely anarchist one. Vineland, however,
focuses on the late sixties, when Old Left organizational strategies
reasserted themselves and the student protest and antiwar movements
collapsed under the strain of the conflict between anarchist and Leninist
elements. The intellectual history of the statist Left is well known, but
Pynchon suggests that a full appreciation of the challenges of the era is
1
impossible without a grasp on the anarchist disposition.
I begin with a survey of negative critical responses to Vineland, cor-
relating their assessments of the novel to historical studies of sixties radi-
calism, which often cite Pynchon, and Vineland specifically, as examples
of the New Left’s shortcomings. Showing that Pynchon’s fourth novel
itself makes exactly these criticisms, I uncover in the second section its
engagement with the New Left as a resurgence of anarchism in American
history, arguing it displays more historical sensitivity and political acumen
than has often been allowed. Though it concurs with well-known criti-
cisms of sixties radicalism, Vineland represents as historically defensible
the New Left’s anarchist preferences for decentralism, individualism, and
ideological fluidity. Historians like Todd Gitlin might refer vaguely to the
counterculture’s disorder as “anarchist,” but there is a more philosophically
specific sense of “anarchism” that runs through foundational sixties texts
like “The Port Huron Statement” (1962) and the work of Paul Goodman,
to which Pynchon and critics like Gitlin both owe debts. My final
section argues that Pynchon’s historiographic intervention enjoins future
generations of radicals to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors
by maintaining a difficult balance. Countercultural individualists should
feel responsible to a greater movement, and Marxist revolutionaries
should nurture an anarchist impulse toward individual freedom; to quote
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McClintic Sphere, from V. : “keep cool but care.”
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that the New Left’s rejection of the Old stemmed from a frustration with
a “programmatic, managerial ethos redolent of the thirties,” and from its
dedication to spontaneity and individualism (2005, 436). As anarchist
groups like the Yippies and Diggers exacerbated these preferences, the
counterculture began to put its hope in “revolution without a script,” a
“widely shared retreat away from public debate and civic engagement
and toward a commitment to personal freedom” that left the Movement
unable or unwilling to combat New Right social and economic policies
that were actively dismantling the legacy of the New Deal ( 445, 459).
In McCann and Szalay’s view, much of postmodern literature
embodies these confused cultural values, and they argue elsewhere that,
even if Vineland is “the most politically incisive of his novels,” it still
provides “a model of sentimental community that reflects . . . impatience
with political complexity” (2009, 151). Though none of the parties
would appreciate the association, such arguments sound much like
Richard Rorty’s in Achieving Our Country, especially his view that since
“the old alliance between the intellectuals and the unions broke down in
the course of the Sixties . . . [the American Left has] permitted cultural
politics to supplant real politics, and [has] collaborated with the Right
in making cultural issues central to public debate” (1998, 14). Again,
the ultimate target is academic and literary postmodernism, and, again,
Vineland appears as a primary example (6–10).
If the late eighties saw the academic postmortem of the New Left
become a staging ground for claims about what elements of the contem-
porary Left were counterproductive, Pynchon’s iconic status as a sixties
author seems to have overshadowed the text of Vineland itself, which was
treated as an anachronistic artifact of the era rather than as a commentary
upon it. Indeed, the novel became something of a Rorschach test for
critical accounts that disparage the 1960s Left. McCann and Szalay
thus join Rorty in citing it as an example of postmodern literature’s
counterproductive tendency to forego political clarity and realist
technique in favor of psychological retreat, artistic experimentation, and
subjectivism. Critics much more sympathetic to postmodern literature
and critical theories, such as McHoul and Tabbi, evaluate the novel just
as negatively, but they argue that the novel works in virtually the opposite
way, departing, as they see it, from the postmodern aesthetics of Pynchon’s
earlier work.They disdain what Tabbi calls a “debased literary realism” that
“has chosen the route of political directness rather than increased literary
complication, topical reference rather than mythic density” (1994, 91, 93).
Michael O’Bryan
Still, appearing after a lengthy silence, this first novel to come from
this sixties author since the end of the long sixties was clearly intended
to take a seat at the discussion table with regard to the political legacy of
the era. One of the stranger features of the early critical conversation on
the novel, then, is that it rehearses criticisms of sixties radicalism made in
the accounts mentioned above, despite the fact that Vineland itself makes
many of the same criticisms of the sixties. The novel was misread in this
way, I suggest, because it situates its critique of the sixties in an anarchist
framework: recuperating philosophical individualism from conclusions
that it selfishly lacks social consciousness, this framework theorizes socially
contingent individualism that requires a mutual respect among individuals
in a community, and thus stipulates collectivist economics. Uninformed
by a coherent understanding of anarchism as a politically specific mode
of thinking and a conscious response to Marxist collectivism, Vineland’s
early critics thus tend to uncritically reproduce, over and over, Marxist
polemics against individualism, leaving little distinction between, say,
Emma Goldman and Barry Goldwater.
This critical blind spot is especially striking because the novel is in
fact blunt in its political messages, sometimes almost preachy, and direct
about the counterculture’s shortcomings. Of many examples, two in par-
ticular accord with the contemporaneous academic portrait of the era. In
the first, Isaiah Two-Four—punk rocker, representative of eighties youth
dissidence, and boyfriend of Prairie Wheeler—tells Prairie’s father, the
aging hippy Zoyd, “Whole problem ‘th you folks’s generation, . . . nothing
personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there
for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute the
Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America,
el deado meato . . . sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970
dollars—it was way too cheap” ( Pynchon 1990, 373). Isaiah sounds here
much like Gitlin, who begins his touchstone work with a list of several
“unavoidable dilemmas” that confronted the counterculture, including
his sense that “the rock ‘n’ roll generation, having grown up on popular
culture, took images very seriously indeed; beholding itself magnified
in the funhouse mirror, it grew addicted to media which had agendas
of their own—celebrity-making, violence-mongering, sensationalism”
( [1987] 1993, 5, 6). Pynchon’s youth dissident, sufficiently removed in time
from the sixties, can articulate a criticism of the era’s politics that concurs
precisely with Gitlin’s historical narrative of the era. Pynchon’s accession
to this narrative explains why, with more references to contemporary
popular media, real and imaginary, than any of Pynchon’s other books,
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speaking “the Marxists totally misunderstood the prospects for the devel-
opment of a freer society, or worse, [failed to understand] that they would
undermine these prospects in their own class interest as state managers
and ideologists” ( [1966] 1987, 20–21). Murray Bookchin, in the thirties
a member of several Communist organizations, wrote in 1984 that “the
60s are particularly significant because they tried to deal with problems
that 30s radicalism left entirely unresolved” (1984, 192)—problems, as he
saw them, stemming from the antidemocratic potentialities of the Old
Left’s centralism, which led Bookchin, in the sixties, to anarchism. At the
1969 SDS national conference, he would distribute “Listen, Marxist!,”
an individualist and decentralist polemic (later collected in his book
Post-Scarcity Anarchism), arguing that “at a time when hierarchy as such
is being brought into question, we hear the hollow demands for ‘cadres,’
‘vanguards’ and ‘leaders.’ At a time when centralization and the state have
been brought to the most explosive point of historical negativity, we hear
the hollow demands for a ‘centralized movement’ and a ‘proletarian dic-
tatorship’” ([1969] 1971, 175). Around the same time, Gil Green, another
Old Left veteran, expressed in The New Radicalism: Anarchist or Marxist?
(1971) exactly this historical tension between Marxist and anarchist
impulses, even though he landed squarely on the side of Communism:
“much of the floundering and confusion within the movement arises
from the existence within it of two currents . . . those who begin to see
the struggle in Marxist class terms and those who view it in anarchist,
individualist terms” (1971, 15).
For Pynchon’s part, his sympathies lie with the anarchist currents
in the sixties and in the long history of the Left, but Vineland largely
focuses on the late-sixties moment that prompted the above texts, when
neo-Leninist factions of SDS had begun to respond to the decentralist
heterogeneity of the anarchic New Left by attempting to reassert the cen-
tralized organizational discipline of the Old Left. Another text from this
moment, public intellectual Paul Goodman’s The New Reformation (1970),
also paints the early New Left as an anarchist renaissance, and sees in the
Movement’s later years a growing conflict between anarchist decentralism
and Leninist hierarchy. Goodman’s account is especially relevant here
because his central example of the tension between anarchist and Leninist
impulses concerns the 1968 student uprising at Columbia University, an
event that strikingly parallels the central plot event of Vineland, the student
uprising at the fictional College of the Surf. Goodman begins his chapter
on anarchism and the New Left quite boldly: “Of the political thought
of the past century, only anarchism or, better, anarcho-pacifism—the
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So they devise a plan by which Frenesi can test her movement’s chances
of remaining uncorrupted. Brock suggests that she hang the snitch jacket
on Weed and surreptitiously pass a firearm to Rex. After the stage is thus
set,Vond insists, Rex will take care of the rest himself.
3
When Frenesi agrees to Brock’s scheme, the inner circles of PR and
24fps disagree over whether or how Weed should be chastened, and she
tries to persuade the group to her thinking:
We either have 100% no-foolin’-around solidarity or it just
doesn’t work. Weed betrayed that . . . ‘cause he knew we can’t
shut anybody out, down that road is fuckin’ fascism, so we take
‘em all, the hypocrites and double agents and summertime
outlaws and all that fringe residue nobody else’ll touch. That’s
3
what PR started out as—so did we for that matter, remember?
The All-Nite Shelter. The lighted doorway out in the Amerikan
dark where nobody gets refused? Weed remembers. (235)
Frenesi identifies the New Left’s strength in the pluralistic, nondoc-
trinaire, and communitarian impulses that Goodman associates with
American anarchism. Strangely, she defends the New Left thus even as
her purpose is to sway her compatriots to cast out and punish a heretic.
The speech is thus an example of what Orwell calls “double think”
in his own novel set in 1984, as Frenesi uses rhetoric of nonviolent
inclusion to justify violent suppression, appealing to the authority of
a need for unitary identity—“100% no-foolin’ solidarity.” She begins
defending the Movement’s anarchist tolerance and openness but leaps to
a Leninist assertion of the need for strong and firm organizational control,
finally arriving at a linguistic maneuver that borrows from the very
authoritarians she deplores, reducing those who will not be controlled to
a dehumanizing euphemism, a “fringe residue.” Rex is persuaded by this
logic of organizational control, takes the gun from Frenesi, and shoots his
friend without trial or question (247). This provides Vond with a legal
pretext, the police invade PR3, and a night of violent conflict ensues, as
the narrative poignantly suggests that the sixties are approaching their
final stage: “a common feeling, reported in interviews later, was of a clear
break just ahead with everything they’d known. Some said ‘end,’ others
‘transition,’ but they could all feel it approaching” (244).
Much has been written about Vineland as a novel of betrayal.12 While
the bulk of such work focuses on Frenesi’s betrayal of her family and
compatriots, and a minority examines how the counterculturalists betray
18
themselves in losing sight of their principles, none has yet addressed Rex’s
betrayal of Weed, which for Pynchon archetypically represents a common
way in which people’s movements undermine themselves. The sum-
mertime revolutionaries would eventually lose their focus and direction,
and the state was brutal in its repressions, but, in Vineland, the Movement
was lost when some leaders became so wedded to organized ideology
and strict control that they lost sight of the community bonds that had
initially constituted the Movement’s strength. In this respect, stressing
how centrally organized collectivism actually represses communities and
how collective liberation requires a basic appreciation of the individual,
Vineland is quintessentially anarchist.
The novel treats sixties radicalism with remarkable historical specific-
ity and with discernible political principles, and if its historical view of
radical politics can at times be difficult to apprehend, it is because the era
itself is complex and not easily summarized. Critics attuned to the novel’s
defenses of the early New Left’s grassroots and communitarian impulses
have tended to overlook the clear criticisms of the counterculture that
arise in the novel’s juxtaposition of the sixties and the eighties. While a
few commentators have noted, as I do, that Vineland mirrors scholarly
opinion by, as Colin Hutchinson writes, showing that “the adoption by
the New Left of the individualist-libertarian Zeitgeist made the New Left
in some ways complicit with the success of a New Right rhetorical model
based upon the notion of freedom from collective intervention” (2008,
37), those critics haven’t acknowledged the novel’s measured justification
of anarchist individualism, or they have noticed these justifications and
concluded that the novel’s politics are confused—a confusion I reread
as a tension expressing the difficult lessons facing historically conscious
revolutionaries from post-sixties generations. I have thus far tried to
show that virtually all commentators, Pynchon included, see in sixties
radicalism a fraught tension between individualism and collectivism, a
tension haunting all modern movements of the radical Left.Though many
of these commentators have pejoratively described the individualism
of the sixties as vaguely “anarchic,” Vineland is unique in that it rejects
the historiographic tendency to champion either individualism or col-
lectivism, suggesting instead that a democratic resistance movement must
dialectically mediate individual rights and collectivist responsibilities.This
mediation forms a politically specific and historically situated definition
of “anarchism,” and in its conclusion the novel models just such a
community project.
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Pynchon 1990, 369). A small but fascinating body of scholarly work has
examined the mutual influence of anarchism and James’s pragmatism, and
it is telling that Pynchon channels Emerson through James during this
13
scene of anarchic consensus building. The reference suggests that the
democratic anarchist decentralism we see in the reunion scene has a long
lineage in the American Left, which is reinforced by the fact that Jess, and
his relatives from Against the Day, are members of the anarcho-syndicalist
IWW rather than Trotskyite or Communist organizations. The attendees
of the reunion organize from the bottom up, stressing individual bonds
among revolutionaries, focusing on local concern. Jess’s annual reading
gestures out toward a larger struggle for class justice, and causally connects
large-scale victories in that struggle to the sort of committed local
organizing we see at the reunion.
The novel’s concluding focus on community bonding and local
organization has been criticized as a retreat from politics into the private
sphere ( McCann and Szalay 2009, 151–52; Tabbi 1994, 98–99; Strehle
1994, 114). But while it is true that Vineland does not outline specific
stances on matters of public policy, the novel’s goal is not to elaborate
political positions but to embody political practices, thereby making a dis-
tinction that is itself political. Certainly, that Jess’s copy of William James
is a “jailhouse copy” seems to indicate that he and his associates have
been involved in direct action and practical political resistance. Moreover,
coordinated withdrawal from national systems can itself constitute passive
resistance to unjust power structures that rely on participation from the
masses. James Joll opens his classic history of anarchism by asserting that
“a withdrawal from the world implies a criticism of the world’s values.
And, moreover, the very act of withdrawal, especially if it led to the
establishment of a group of like-minded devotees, often involved those
who practiced it in measures that might seem dangerously subversive”
(1964, 17–18). Group withdrawal from economic structures is certainly
political when it manifests in a general strike, a favored anarchist tactic
roughly enacted by the loosely confederated communities in withdrawal
that communicate through WASTE in The Crying of Lot 49. Thus John
McClure, in Partial Faiths, identifies the reunion scene with the theory
and practice of contemporary anarcho-syndicalist and Green movements
(2007, 48–59) and, in a rebuttal to McCann and Szalay, argues that
“it was, of course, in just such communities, up and down the coast
from Northern California to Washington, that the grassroots American
antiglobalization movement was born” (2009, 136).
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Conclusion
I have tried in this essay, first, to establish Vineland’s importance in
the Pynchon canon and, second, to indicate through my defense of
the novel ways in which we might begin to reexamine our sense of
American literature related to the New Left. For the first, I hope to have
demonstrated that Vineland is hardly a nostalgic lament for the idyllic
sixties counterculture; though the era is represented with affection, this
representation is framed in the narrative present of the eighties, with
clear-sighted criticisms of the counterculture’s short-sightedness and
organizational inefficiency. Moreover, the sixties themselves are presented
with political nuance and a fine eye for historical detail. The portrayal
engages actual historical events in the era, and considerable care is taken
to portray both the various ideological factions that constituted the
fractious Movement and the relationship of those factions to a broader
history of the American Left. For these reasons, I suggest Vineland forms
a capstone to the first half of Pynchon’s career, which in many ways itself
embodies the conflicted and difficult politics of the sixties counterculture.
The dissolution of the New Left was followed by a long silence from
Pynchon, until Vineland took its place in an active dissection of the
Movement’s collapse then occurring in the public sphere. By reevaluating
countercultural politics Vineland initiated the second stage of Pynchon’s
career, with Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice
(2009), and the recent Bleeding Edge (2013) following in the years since.
The first two of these return to the familiar encyclopedic aesthetics for
which Pynchon’s early work is known, looking back not to the sixties
but to other historical periods germane to American politics. Vineland
forms the crucial pivot between Pynchon’s early and late career, resolving
the author’s relationship to the sixties and clearing the way for a broader
treatment of American history, and any comprehensive treatment of
Pynchon’s career must grapple with the novel’s centrality for his politics
and historical self-positioning.
As for my second objective, I hope that my treatment of Vineland’s
complicated politics might help spawn further study of anarchism’s
influence on twentieth-century American fiction, and particularly on
literature of the sixties. Historical treatments of the New Left generally
ground themselves in sympathy either for the postmodern movements
that both succeeded and critiqued sixties radicalism or for the socialist and
Marxist politics that preceded the period. In the former case, the New
Left’s anarchist decentralism and individuality are lauded for helping clear
24
§
Michael O’Bryan is lecturer at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and
at Washington University in St. Louis. His book project, “Spontaneous and
Leaderless”:The Anarchist Impulse in Twentieth-Century Literary Experiment, argues
that aesthetic homologies between works of fiction across the twentieth
century stem from their shared engagement with the history of anarchist
theory and practice.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the two readers for Twentieth-Century Literature, James
Berger and Sue J. Kim, as well as William J. Maxwell and Dustin R. Iler, all of
whom provided vital feedback on early drafts of this article.
Notes
1. Readers interested in a primer on the history and practice of anarchist
thought should consult James Joll’s The Anarchists (1964) for a brief narrative
overview of the history of European anarchism, George Woodcock’s Anarchism
( [1962] 2004) for a treatment of anarchist history since the Spanish Civil War,
and Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible (1992) for an exhaustive com-
pendium of anarchist history in a global perspective. The best recent example
of the push and pull between anarchist and Marxist impulses that I describe
is represented in Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism,
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26
6. In one of the few early critical pieces that estimated the novel positively,
N. Keith Booker notes that it “consistently calls the radicals of the sixties to
task for lacking the theoretical awareness to constitute a genuinely effective
program of political change” (1993, 97).
7. Central to the long history of anarchist theory is the mutual necessity of
individual liberty and collectivist organization. Consider Mikhail Bakunin’s
properly dialectical claim that “freedom without Socialism is privilege and
injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality” ( [1867]
1953, 269), or Alexander Berkman’s view that it was anarchism, not Leninism,
that strove for the stateless equality that Marx and Engels promised: “the
greatest teachers of socialism [Marx and Engels] had taught that anarchism
would come from Socialism. They said that we must first have socialism, but
that after socialism there will be anarchism, and that it would be a freer and
more beautiful condition of society to live in than socialism” ( [1929] 1992, 1).
8. References to anarchism in Pynchon’s work reach as far back as George
Levine’s “Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Thomas Pynchon’s
Fiction” (1976), but Levine’s classic, setting the dominant critical tone, evokes
anarchism only as a loose conceptual category rather than as a defined political
inclination with historical boundaries. Most recently, in “Escaping the Politics
of Irredeemable Earth: Anarchy and Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas
Pynchon” (2010), Seán Molloy has noticed that “Pynchon interprets 1984 as
a warning from the Left against the terrors held not only by fascism, but the
fascism within the Left itself, and one may infer inherent in all political life,”
and has connected this insight to anarchist sympathy in Vineland. Ultimately,
however, Molloy feels that Pynchon’s fiction rejects all politics, including
anarchism, because “the ultimate consequence of resistance is futility”
(2010). To my mind, his argument that Pynchon counters that futility with
a metaphysical transcendence of the notion of politics itself runs up against
the representation of the numerous Nazi rocket scientists in Gravity’s Rainbow
who dream of escaping a debased Earth, forming a cautionary tale about
transcendental faith that appears less directly in all Pynchon’s novels. For other
treatments, see Benton 2002 and Thomas 2007.
9. Orwell’s complicated relationship with anarchism is charted by George
Woodcock, a prominent historian of anarchism, in The Crystal Spirit (1966), a
unique study that is partly literary-critical exegesis of Orwell’s works and partly
a memoir of the friendship between Orwell and the author. Woodcock claims
that the novelist “described himself rather vaguely as an Anarchist” as a young
man for nearly a decade before fighting for anarchist militias in the Spanish
Civil War (1966, 26). Even so, the historian recalls many quarrels with Orwell
during the Second World War over the pacifist and antinationalist stances
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